


By the time I get the courage

by ABookAndACoffee



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Angst, F/M, Feelings, I just wanted an excuse to explore feelings, Queen of nothing spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:01:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21578776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABookAndACoffee/pseuds/ABookAndACoffee
Summary: Jude lets some things off her chest, telling Cardan how she's been feeling - while he's a snake and can't respond to her.“Did you think of me, while I was gone? All I could do was think of you.” I clench my fists and hope that the words came out as wrath-like as I intended.“Your name echoed through my head and I wished you could hear every bit of it. I wished that you could hear me when I used your name as a curse, and when I screamed it in anger, and when I tried to cry your name but was choked with tears. I wanted you to know every single dark moment.”
Relationships: Jude Duarte/Cardan Greenbriar
Comments: 3
Kudos: 129





	By the time I get the courage

Leaning back against the broken throne, I try to find a spot where the cracks don’t dig into me. Given the turmoil in the courts and in my mind, asking for somewhere comfortable to sit should be the least of my demands. But Cardan’s rage upon being turned into a beast has, of course, made even that impossible, and I shift from one hip to another. I finally give up and find a position against a sliver of stone that digs into my spine. Sitting to my immediate right or left would be more painful, and I think about that phrase I taught Cardan once, about being between a rock and a hard place. 

I stifle a laugh at the ridiculousness. It was a metaphor for something I didn’t understand at the time, but now I feel all too comfortable with. Only now, I know that there are always more than just two difficult choices.

Cardan has finally settled down enough that I can try to relax, think, fix this problem. The crowd of gawking faeries has been barred from the room and he seems to have accepted his new form. After we banished the crowd he spent some time slithering around the stone floor before coming to a rest around the throne. I suppose it’s the closest he can come to sitting on it, after breaking the Blood Crown.

But I haven’t settled down. I’m thinking about Grimsen’s words, wondering how I can help Cardan regain his Cardan-shaped self again while proving that I am not, in fact, a queen who should be overthrown. All these faeries and their damn riddles! If only they could have found another way to be deceitful. Perhaps never speaking. That might have been a good look for someone like Locke, if only I’d had the chance to suggest it before Taryn took care of him for all of us. 

It feels good to think about problems that have been solved. They remind me that sometimes, I can wake up and someone has taken care of my enemies for me. It’s quite exhausting work, after all. Then again, I slept so much while banished in the mortal world that I wondered how they manage to accomplish anything.

I shift against the rock of the broken throne. Biting my tongue so hard that I taste blood, I wrack my brain for a solution. But all I can think about is how disappointed Cardan will be if I didn’t get him out of this situation, after what he had to do to retrieve me from the Undersea. Somehow, I think that Faerie will mourn his loss, whereas they would not have mourned mine. 

I glance over to where Cardan has come to a rest. His body is curled around the throne, a testament to how monstrous he has become. He had everything anyone could want. All of the power and none of the responsibility, since he could rest that on my shoulders. And still, he asked for his people to trust him, to choose him. 

It was trust that he freely gave me, if I am to believe him. 

His tail is to my right, thumping on the ground like a cat’s. I don’t know if I should take it for contentment or agitation. To my left, he has rested his chin on the broken stones of the floor. He’s staring at me, waiting for me to say something. Cardan’s breath is hot and warm, and nothing like I remember from when we shared a bed. I find it hard to breathe under his watch, his expectation that I’ll solve this, too.

The quiet of the room is deafening. All I can do is think, but I am so, so tired of thinking. The stakes in this particular problem are death, and yet all I can think about is everything I have ever wanted to tell a prone, silent Cardan. Especially if he might die immediately afterward, anyway.

I could tell him anything, and he would be silent as the grave, as I’ve heard mortals say.

“Do you remember when you said that you trust me, Cardan? When Taryn pretended to be me?” I look away from him as I speak. My voice takes up too much space but I can’t retrieve the words. I hold in my breath as I wait for some sign that he has heard me and understood my question. Instead, Cardan looks lazily across the room as if I haven’t spoken. 

“I have never given you reason to trust me. And besides,” I say, my eyes flicking his way for a moment. “I would have thought you much cleverer than that. You let your trust in me become a weakness. To be tricked by my twin?” 

Something in my stomach twinges. It reminds me of the way I felt when I realized that Taryn had betrayed me. Again. Disappointment that I had counted on someone so much, but that it should have been Cardan was a new hurt. 

“I thought you knew me better than that.” I tap my fingers on the stone floor of the room. I can’t keep still, some part of my body always finding a reason to move.

I look Cardan in the eye again - his face is so large that my eye can’t take it in in its entirety - and then look down at my lap. I pick at a loose thread in the seam of my pants. 

“You should have known better. You should have known that I wouldn’t have come to you asking for a favor. I would have demanded it. And you should have known that my sister and I are nothing alike. I don’t capitulate.”

There’s a hint of bitterness in my voice, and I tell myself it’s borne of anger. Not disappointment that my dearest enemy failed to recognize me. 

I shift onto my knees so that I am facing Cardan head-on. He blinks lazily as I watched him through narrowed eyes. “Can you hear me?”

He blinks once. Perhaps he’s just tired. I know all too well the exhaustive effects of their magic, how nearly all of it is designed to weaken and disorient.

I reach up to tap him between his eyes but then think better of it and rest my palms on the floor. “Blink twice for yes, three times for no.” 

He looks annoyed at me, somehow, and instead of blinking he chuffs out another gust of hot air. I sit back on my heels to find space to breathe.

“It’s like that ridiculous saying, right? That mortals like? About trees falling? If no one can hear me, and you can’t understand me, then did it really happen?” I begin cracking my knuckles one at a time and stop when I notice Cardan glaring - well, glaring as best he can - at my hands. Wiping my palms on my pants, I push myself up from the ground. 

“No one has ever said that before. That they trust me, I mean.” I clasp my hands behind my back as I pace back and forth in front of him. “And you meant it.” I clear my throat when my voice threatens to break. 

“I never trusted you,” I continue. I keep my eyes on the broken ground before me so that I don’t lose my footing on the uneven stones. “But I wanted to. Do you know what it is, to question everything? To assume that every spoken word is a lie? It doesn’t even matter if someone cares about you. They will still find a way to lie.” 

I think of Taryn, of Madoc, of Cardan. At least Nicasia had the graciousness to allow her hatred to live in the open. 

Cardan watches me pace the room, his head shifting back and forth as his forked tongue tastes the air. I wonder what his new sense tell him. Perhaps he can taste a lie now. 

“Don’t look at me like that.”

Cardan blinks slowly, the strangeness of his serpentine eyelids making me wonder again how much of him is in there. 

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly through my nose, trying to contain my frustration. 

“I watched a show while I was away,” I say, a false lightness in my voice. “I think you’d like it. It was very competitive, and there were sparkly costumes.” 

Talking to Cardan about the mortal world is likely as useful as trying to explain veganism to a cat. I sigh and look to the door. Any moment now, someone will knock and remind me that everyone else is utterly useless at restoring Cardan’s form. He won’t even have a chance to prove that his trust in his subjects was well placed. 

“Did you think of me, while I was gone? All I could do was think of you.” I clench my fists and hope that the words came out as wrath-like as I intended. 

“Your name echoed through my head and I wished you could hear every bit of it. I wished that you could hear me when I used your name as a curse, and when I screamed it in anger, and when I tried to cry your name but was choked with tears. I wanted you to know every single dark moment.”

I stop walking and I look up at the vaulted ceiling, biting my tongue again to keep from speaking, to keep from spilling forth truths and lies and not knowing which is which. I would spit this blood on the stones before him and let him decide what he can trust. 

Perhaps this is fitting. Cardan is effectively exiled in his own body and I might be the only one who can pardon him, who can figure out the answer to this riddle.

I kneel next to Cardan and wait a moment before I rest a hand on the top of his head. His curls are gone, his jaw a decidedly non-human or faerie shape, and I wonder if he can lie now. 

“You said you love me.” My words echo in the large, empty room, and I grimace. “When did you know?”

His gaze remains blank. Perhaps he can lie. 

“Did you tell me in the letters? I’m not sure if it was Lady Asha who kept them from me, but I can tell you now that your mother and I will not have a close relationship.”

I slide my fingertips from the top of his head and trace a path along his jaw. Then I stand and resume my previous path, pacing to and fro before him. I am fairly certain that by the time someone else lends a hand at solving this problem, I will have worn out a smooth rut on these ancient stones. 

“I never wrote you any letters,” I say. “Just in case you were wondering.”

I flick my gaze down at him. No change. 

I turn on my heels and walk the opposite direction. “No, all I did was think about what I would say to you. Exactly how I would lay hands on you again. I have so many reasons to hate you, Cardan Greenbriar. So why can’t I think of a single one now? Why can’t I walk away now?”

I sigh again, something I am quite unused to doing. Sighs are for lovers and those who prefer languishing to action. Slumping to the ground, I cross my legs and face Cardan. 

“Two blinks for yes, three for no,” I remind him. Tilting my head, I wait for confirmation that isn’t returned. I look him in the eye before I begin speaking again, keen for any sign that he is aware of every word I say. 

“It’s possible that I’ve found you… pleasing, for a while now. I’m not sure I can pinpoint a date, between the faerie fruit and the attempts at glamouring. I never knew that love was so tightly wound up in other emotions. Why don’t mortals have a saying about that?” 

Cardan blinks once. I frown.

“Yes, I know. I’m mortal too. At least I think I am.” My mind goes to the wound on my side, the one that hasn’t healed but is no longer a threat to my life.

“Faerie is really going to hate having us as king and queen, won’t it?”

Cardan lets out a quick breath that from a faerie or human might have been a laugh, and I know that he means we’ll hate it, too. At least at first. 

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” I quote. I never know what I’m quoting exactly. Stories have come to me in bits and pieces, and I’ve never been able to discern which are from an original work, and which have been distorted to prove someone’s point. Perhaps my own story has become just as convoluted as all the others. Perhaps it’s time I start to write my own.

“We spend so much time trying to figure out how to express ourselves.” I pick at the skin around my fingernails, then remember the way Cardan would look at my hands and let them fall to my side. “So many rules and metaphors and tales. You can’t lie but I thought that’s all you did. You say you wrote me letters, but I never received them. Why is telling the truth never good enough?”

Cardan lifts his head, for the first time seeming to respond to me. He slithers forward, just enough so that he can lay his chin on my lap. I keep my hands away for a moment, until I’m sure that he is looking for something like comfort. Then I rest them on the top of his head. My fingers trace the scales, noticing the complex of colors shining amongst the black. I’ve never taken the time to touch him like this. To explore what’s really there.

A knock comes at the door, gentle but urgent enough that I know it’s time to leave. Perhaps a solution has been discovered. I stand and walk to the door and Cardan slithers across the floor behind me, nearly as tall as I am when he comes to a standstill. 

I look back at him. “So. What do we say now?”

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I’ve written jurdan - hope you enjoy!


End file.
